Elon Musk accused Sam Altman of “stealing” a non-profit, but the trial revealed they shared similar goals.

The jury’s prompt decision to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the founding members of OpenAI and Microsoft reaffirmed what was evident in court: Musk’s case was fundamentally weak, partly due to the prolonged delay in filing.

During the closing arguments last week, attorneys for OpenAI carefully outlined how the law favored their client, while the plaintiffs’ team concentrated on questioning Sam Altman’s credibility and expressed disbelief at anyone opposing Musk’s claims.

As a result, after the verdict, there was a palpable disbelief that Musk had lost—most notably from Musk himself. In a post he later deleted, Musk referred to Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers as a “terrible activist Oakland judge” and announced his intent to appeal, claiming “there is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity.”

However, Altman and Brockman were not the only individuals who gained from OpenAI’s non-profit investments. Despite Musk and his legal team’s focus on Altman, the trial also revealed significant details about Musk himself.

One incident that emerged in court illustrated Musk benefiting from OpenAI in a rather concerning manner. Greg Brockman testified that in 2017, Musk requested him to bring a team of OpenAI researchers to Tesla’s headquarters to assist the autopilot team for several weeks. “It was pretty clear that was not something we could say no to,” Brockman remarked.

Brockman recounted leading a team of prominent scientists, including Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, and Scott Grey, to advise the “demoralized” Tesla staff. They generated ideas to enhance the vehicle’s self-driving technology, with Sutskever suggesting that finding 10,000 images of a complex corner case would enable them to fix the software. Musk even asked Brockman for recommendations on which employees to terminate, which he refused to provide.

Another individual familiar with the events corroborated Brockman’s testimony, stating that Tesla did not compensate OpenAI for the contributions made by its employees. Musk’s family office, Excession, did not respond to a request for comment.

At the core of Musk’s case is the assertion that Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI breached charitable trust—Musk alleges that he donated funds for a specific charitable goal, while his co-founders used them for other purposes. He also claims they experienced “unjust enrichment” due to stock and other advantages from OpenAI’s for-profit arm.

In the incident involving OpenAI scientists assisting Tesla, Musk’s charitable contributions were intended to hire scientists dedicated to safeguarding the benefits of AGI. Instead, they worked for free at his for-profit enterprise.

Dorothy Lund, a professor at Columbia Law School and co-host of the Beyond Unprecedented podcast, informed TechCrunch that this arrangement would likely be illegal, asserting, “It’s a bit rich for Musk to be suing for breach of a charitable trust when he appears to have been redirecting assets inconsistently with that mission.”

While it’s true that the self-driving work involved artificial intelligence, Musk’s witnesses stressed that the self-driving project at Tesla was fundamentally different from OpenAI’s research objectives. This difference was emphasized by Karpathy’s departure from OpenAI to Tesla shortly after the incident. OpenAI’s attorneys argued that Musk violated his duty to the lab, where he served as co-chair, by recruiting one of its key researchers to his own company.

Another factor likely influencing the jury was the amount of time Musk spent attempting to gain unilateral control of a prospective for-profit arm of OpenAI in 2017. Musk employed good cop-bad cop tactics to persuade his co-founders to grant him total control—offering them free Teslas and threatening to withhold his donations.

His actions placed his attorneys in a challenging position, needing to convince the jury that there was a significant distinction between Musk’s vision and the for-profit entity that ultimately emerged. They suggested that a “small adjunct” for-profit could be acceptable, although OpenAI’s witnesses illustrated that non-profits with substantial commercial arms are common.

In fact, a plausible counterfactual suggests that had Musk accepted one of his co-founders’ proposals to redistribute equity more evenly, he might today be one of OpenAI’s largest shareholders—just not the controlling one. Multiple times during the trial, Musk’s associates testified that he refuses to invest in any venture where he could not maintain sole control.

The dismissal of Musk’s claims due to the delay in filing has been categorized as a technicality; however, the statute of limitations holds significance: Individuals and organizations make crucial decisions based on their understanding of what is permissible. When someone like Musk takes too long to file a lawsuit, the costs of reversing those decisions may outweigh any just compensation.

While none of the jurors have shared how they reached their verdict, they were asked to consider whether, prior to August 5, 2021, Musk should have been aware that OpenAI was expending resources outside its mission or launching a for-profit affiliate. The answer to that question is evident: Musk himself was engaged in those activities.